Time to get off the bench...

Many of us have been captivated as the largest ecological disaster in our history slowly unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico.  The days pass as man struggles to put the cork back in the bottle and ebb the eruption of oil from the ocean floor.  The images are heartbreaking.

The reality is that fossil fuels have been wiping out life in the Gulf of Mexico for many years.  Our industrial food production system is heavily reliant on fertilizers that are produced from fossil fuels.  Most of the fertilizer used in the Midwest washes off the crops and fields and eventually is deposited in the Mississippi River which empties out into the Gulf of Mexico. (here is a animated explanation)

The nitrogen in the fertilizer spurs the rampant growth of algae in the water which eventually sucks the oxygen out of the water -- no oxygen, no life.

The size of the dead zone varies but it can be as large as the state of New Jersey, or about 7,000 square miles.  (more here)


We have simply added a killing zone to the dead zone.


While the anger towards BP is warranted the opportunity presented by this catastrophe will be wasted if yet again we only focus on the symptoms. Or worse, if we simply do nothing.


The use of  coal causes a myriad of health problems and thousands of deaths across the country.  Thousands of US soldiers are continually put in harm's way to ensure adequate access to oil fields.  Contamination by leaks from oil tankers and oil wells destroy entire ecosystems around the world every year.  The burning of fossils fuels are the driving force behind climate change that threatens to create an unlivable planet.


When do we start acting like adults and acknowledge the simple facts?  When do we start to make changes in our society?  Want a livable planet?  Want a few other life forms to survive with us?  Want to revive the American economy?  Then do the following:

1. Write/Call your senator (Yes, really):   Demand that we put a price on carbon.  Demand that they take action to stop global warming.  The true cost to society of burning coal and oil is not yet reflected in the prices we pay.  Once costs rise for these dirty fuels, industry will rapidly shift to renewable energy.  Renewable energy is LOCAL energy....local jobs, local manufacturing....what's not to like?
   
   You can find your senator's contact information here.
   
   
2. Live a sustainable life style:  Each week look for a new way to reduce the amount of energy you use.  Drive less.  Get an energy audit for your home.  Weatherize your home.  Install some solar power on your roof.  Buying a new appliance?  Do your homework and get the most energy efficient model you can.  Buy less stuff. Avoid plastics.  Re-use.  Recycle.  

 Life is not a spectator sport.

Food for Thought

It was an amazing day at the Slow Money National Gathering today here in Burlington, VT.  This movement is about creating an alternative to our unsustainable industrial food system.  The presenters were humble, good-natured, and stunningly intelligent and pragmatic.  I challenge anyone to not be inspired by the stories of their efforts to create healthy food in a way that is both profitable and ecologically sound.  Their efforts to figure out how to allow people like you and me to invest in our local communities and support our local farmers and artisans.  Or current legal system actually makes it very hard to do this.  Despite all the odds people are making it happen.  It is real.  An odd mix of financial gurus, social entrepreneurs, and farmers are working together to create this new future.  What's all the fuss about?  Well, here is a great article that was in Time Magazine about our current food system and its trappings. 

Friday, Aug. 21, 2009

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

By Bryan Walsh

Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009
Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009. (See TIME's photo-essay "From Farm to Fork.")
Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us — ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair's landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming — our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.
And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous. A series of recalls involving contaminated foods this year — including an outbreak of salmonella from tainted peanuts that killed at least eight people and sickened 600 — has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system — from seed to 7‑Eleven — that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America's obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. "The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us," says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). (See pictures of what the world eats.)
Some Americans are heeding such warnings and working to transform the way the country eats — ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food in ways that don't bankrupt the earth. Documentaries like the scathing Food Inc. and the work of investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are reprising Sinclair's work, awakening a sleeping public to the uncomfortable realities of how we eat. Change is also coming from the very top. First Lady Michelle Obama's White House garden has so far yielded more than 225 lb. of organic produce — and tons of powerful symbolism. But hers is still a losing battle. Despite increasing public awareness, sustainable agriculture, while the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, remains a tiny enterprise: according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. Sustainable food is also pricier than conventional food and harder to find. And while large companies like General Mills have opened organic divisions, purists worry that the very definition of sustainability will be co-opted as a result. (See pictures of urban farming around the world.)
But we don't have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil — which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills — our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy — demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 — but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants — and as every farmer knows, if you don't take care of your land, it can't take care of you.
See 10 things to buy during the recession.
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
The Downside of Cheap
For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you've never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat. According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bu. annually, up from 4 billion bu. as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we're eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa.
But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized — both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop — at least until corn ethanol skewed the market — artificially low. That's why McDonald's can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. "Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that's what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on," says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)
So what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat — especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories — some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s — but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.
Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone — and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what's known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
The food industry's degradation of animal life, of course, isn't limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren't widgets with legs. They're living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?
Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. "This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can't even play in anymore," says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.
To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we're breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year — a figure that's almost certainly higher now. "I don't think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics," says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
See more pictures of what the world eats.
See photos from a grocery store auction.
The livestock industry argues that estimates of antibiotics in food production are significantly overblown. Resistance "is the result of human use and not related to veterinary use," according to Kristina Butts, the manager of legislative affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. But with wonder drugs losing their effectiveness, it makes sense to preserve them for as long as we can, and that means limiting them to human use as much as possible. "These antibiotics are not given to sick animals," says Representative Louise Slaughter, who is sponsoring a bill to limit antibiotic use on farms. "It's a preventive measure because they are kept in pretty unspeakable conditions."
Such a measure would get at a symptom of the problem but not at the source. Just as the burning of fossil fuels that is causing global warming requires more than a tweaking of mileage standards, the manifold problems of our food system require a comprehensive solution. "There should be a recognition that what we are doing is unsustainable," says Martin. And yet, still we must eat. So what can we do? (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)
Getting It Right
If a factory farm is hell for an animal, then Bill Niman's seaside ranch in Bolinas, Calif., an hour north of San Francisco, must be heaven. The property's cliffside view over the Pacific Ocean is worth millions, but the black Angus cattle that Niman and his wife Nicolette Hahn Niman raise keep their eyes on the ground, chewing contentedly on the pasture. Grass — and a trail of hay that Niman spreads from his truck periodically — is all the animals will eat during the nearly three years they'll spend on the ranch. That all-natural, noncorn diet — along with the intensive, individual care that the Nimans provide their animals — produces beef that many connoisseurs consider to be among the best in the world. But for Niman, there is more at stake than just a good steak. He believes that his way of raising farm animals — in the open air, with no chemicals or drugs and with maximum care — is the only truly sustainable method and could be a model for a better food system. "What we need in this country is a completely different way of raising animals for food," says Hahn Niman, a former attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. "This needs to be done in the right way."
The Nimans like to call what they do "beyond organic," and there are some signs that consumers are beginning to catch up. This November, California voters approved a ballot proposition that guarantees farm animals enough space to lie down, stand up and turn around. Worldwide, organic food — a sometimes slippery term but on the whole a practice more sustainable than conventional food — is worth more than $46 billion. That's still a small slice of the overall food pie, but it's growing, even in a global recession. "There is more pent-up demand for organic than there is production," says Bill Wolf, a co-founder of the organic-food consultancy Wolf DiMatteo and Associates. (Watch TIME's video "The New Frugality: The Organic Gardener.")
So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It's clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down — a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.
It's that very efficiency that's led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash, reflected not just in the growth of farmers' markets or the growing involvement of big corporations in organics but also in the local-food movement, in which restaurants and large catering services buy from suppliers in their areas, thereby improving freshness, supporting small-scale agriculture and reducing the so-called food miles between field and plate. That in turn slashes transportation costs and reduces the industry's carbon footprint.
A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."
See pictures of the global food crisis.
See pictures of the world's most polluted places.
One model for how the new paradigm could work is Niman Ranch, a larger operation that Bill Niman founded in the 1990s, before he left in 2007. (By his own admission, he's a better farmer than he is a businessman.) The company has knitted together hundreds of small-scale farmers into a network that sells all-natural pork, beef and lamb to retailers and restaurants. In doing so, it leverages economies of scale while letting the farmers take proper care of their land and animals. "We like to think of ourselves as a force for a local-farming community, not as a large corporation," says Jeff Swain, Niman Ranch's CEO.
Other examples include the Mexican-fast-food chain Chipotle, which now sources its pork from Niman Ranch and gets its other meats and much of its beans from natural and organic sources. It's part of a commitment that Chipotle founder Steve Ells made years ago, not just because sustainable ingredients were better for the planet but because they tasted better too — a philosophy he calls Food with Integrity. It's not cheap for Chipotle — food makes up more than 32% of its costs, the highest in the fast-food industry. But to Ells, the taste more than compensates, and Chipotle's higher prices haven't stopped the company's rapid growth, from 16 stores in 1998 to over 900 today. "We put a lot of energy into finding farmers who are committed to raising better food," says Ells. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)
Bon Appétit Management Company, a caterer based in Palo Alto, Calif., takes that commitment even further. The company sources as much of its produce as possible from within 150 miles of its kitchens and gets its meat from farmers who eschew antibiotics. Bon Appétit also tries to influence its customers' habits by nudging them toward greener choices. That includes campaigns to reduce food waste, in part by encouraging servers at its kitchens to offer smaller, more manageable portions. (The USDA estimates that Americans throw out 14% of the food we buy, which means that much of our record-breaking harvests ends up in the garbage.) And Bon Appétit supports a low-carbon diet, one that uses less meat and dairy, since both have a greater carbon footprint than fruit, vegetables and grain. The success of the overall operation demonstrates that sustainable food can work at an institutional scale bigger than an élite restaurant, a small market or a gourmet's kitchen — provided customers support it. "Ultimately it's going to be consumer demand that will cause change, not Washington," says Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appétit's co-founder. (See pictures of two farms in Nebraska.)
How willing are consumers to rethink the way they shop for — and eat — food? For most people, price will remain the biggest obstacle. Organic food continues to cost on average several times more than its conventional counterparts, and no one goes to farmers' markets for bargains. But not all costs can be measured by a price tag. Once you factor in crop subsidies, ecological damage and what we pay in health-care bills after our fatty, sugary diet makes us sick, conventionally produced food looks a lot pricier.
What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that's to quit thinking big. We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there's not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24‑oz. steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive. "The idea is that healthy and good-tasting food should be available to everyone," says Hahn Niman. "The food system should be geared toward that."
Whether that happens will ultimately come down to all of us, since we have the chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we're particularly hungry). It's true that most of us would prefer not to think too much about where our food comes from or what it's doing to the planet — after all, as Chipotle's Ells points out, eating is not exactly a "heady intellectual event." But if there's one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it's that very thing: consciousness. Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty — it's based on selective forgetting. But what we eat — how it's raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can't be ignored any longer.
— With reporting by Rebecca Kaplan / New York
The original version of this article mistakenly referred to the Bon Appétit Management Company as the Bon Appétit Food Management Company
See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
The Tale of Two Cattle
How did your hamburger get to your plate — and what did it eat along the way? The journey of beef illustrates the great American food chain
ORGANIC (1% of all cattle)
This is the way all beef used to be raised — and how some people still imagine it is. Bill Niman tends a small herd with one of the lightest hands in the business and produces what Bay Area chefs swear is unparalleled beef
Diet: Grass
Niman's cows eat only grass, along with a smattering of hay. That's the normal diet for cattle. Their rumen, a digestive organ, can break down grasses we'd find inedible
Supplements: None
Niman gives no supplements whatsoever to his cattle — no drugs, no hormones, no additives. That's not ironclad for organic beef — some companies might use antimicrobials — but generally the animals are supplement-free
Environmental Impact: Living with the Land
To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn't need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There's no need to clean up manure — with Niman's low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land
Human Impact: The Omega Effect
Beef has a bad rep among nutritionists, but that might be partly unfair for grass-fed steaks. According to research from the University of California, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids than conventional beef
CONVENTIONAL (99% of all cattle)
The vast majority of all American cattle start off on open ranges, but that's where the similarity to their organic cousins ends. They're shifted after a few months to the tight quarters of an industrial feedlot, to be fattened up as fast as possible
Diet: Grass and corn
Conventional cattle feed off grass pasture for the first several months, but at the feedlot, they're switched to a heavily corn-based diet, which makes them gain weight faster but also makes them get sick more easily
Supplements: Chemicals
In part to help them survive the crowded conditions of feedlots, where infections can spread fast, conventional cattle are given antibiotics in their feed, and sometimes growth hormones, bloods and fats
Environmental Impact: Waste
A 1,000-head feedlot produces up to 280 tons of manure a week, and the smell can be powerful. All that feed corn requires millions of tons of fertilizer and, ultimately, a lot of petroleum
Human Impact: Fat Attack
Feeding corn to cattle for the last several months of their lives doesn't just get them fatter faster; it also changes the quality of the beef. Corn helps produce that marbled taste many of us love, but it can result in beef that is higher in fat — helping to fuel the obesity epidemic

A Timely Thought

It has been over a week since my last blog posting.  Hopefully, you noticed and perhaps even lamented the omission.  So, what kept me from writing?  Did I run out of things to say?  Been traveling?  Bed-ridden with illness?

Alas, nothing so major -- I just didn't have time.  I recently started a new job so that has greatly cut into my blogging time.  On Wednesday I traveled to New York do a talk on sustainability ("The American Dream, The World's Nightmare") for an organization.  Most of my nights leading up to this event were spent working on adding new slides and revamping the presentation.  So, just not much time.

In our current society most of us are asset rich and time poor.  We have so much stuff in fact that the self-storage industry is one the fastest growing sectors in America.  You know the places, those little sheds that many of us rent each month to hold all the extra stuff that doesn't fit in our current home.  This is especially ironic given the average house size has grown dramatically during the same time period while average household size has shrunk! (so bigger and bigger houses, with fewer and fewer people in those houses, and we still don't have enough space for all our stuff)

 

 To pay for all this stuff Americans work longer hours than workers in just about any other industrialized country.

We work longer hours than the English, the French, and much more than the Germans and the Norwegians.  We take less vacation.  We retire later.  

The more time we spend working the worse the impact on the planet and our souls.  Why?

With rising incomes we have more and more money to buy things.  Bigger homes.  Bigger TVs.  More TVs.  Bigger and fancier cars.  Multiple cars.  More and more clothes.  More gadgets.  You know the drill.

But with all those extra hours at work we have less time for ourselves.  Less time to spend with our families.  Less time to engage with our communities.  Less time for the things that actually make us human.  We are are social beings.  Our well-being, our happiness is fundamentally rooted in our connection to others.  We are becoming more and more isolated, more individualistic, and less connected to others.   Depression rates are 10x higher than 50 years ago.  We have the highest divorce rate in the world.  We have the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Drug use is a constant problem.

To fill the void we consume more.  The buzz is nice, but it soon wears off.  That new ipod will never fill the void left by a disenfranchised family, distant friends, and no sense of belonging to community.  But we keep trying.  "Retail Therapy" anyone? 

In a sustainable world we will be asset poor but time rich.  We will work less, perhaps 20 hours a week.  Maybe 3 days a week.  With less income we will consume much less, reducing our burden on the planet.  Imagine living in a place where you now have time.  Time to really play with your children.  Time to go on a long walk.  Time to walk to the store.  Time for a bubble bath.  Time to actually cook and taste a meal.  Time to plant food and harvest it.  Time to tinker around the house.  Time to read all those books you've wanted to read.  Time to, gasp, re-read the same book. Time to learn to play the guitar.  Time to spend with your grandmother.  Time to improve your tennis serve (I need a lot of time for that one).  Time to nap.  Time to help your friends.  Time to volunteer.  Time to sing.  Time to dance. Time to walk the dog.  Time to write your senator.   Time to read great blog posts.  Time to write great blog posts.  Time to do, well, nothing at all.

Time to imagine the world we really want. 

It's time to make it happen.  Work Less.  Buy Less.  Live More.

A world full of Americans?

Many in the US believe that the rest of the world should follow in our economic footpath and if they do, they can benefit from the "American Dream."  Philosophical questions aside, is this even possible?  Can the planet support a world full of people who consume in the same way as a typical American?

How do Americans consume?  This slide will give you a sense.

We represent about 5% of the world population which is indicated by that blue piece of the pie.  That is our fair share of resources from the planet.  The amount we actually consume is shown in blue + purple.  As you can see, we consume much, much more than our fair share.

Although 1/20th of the world's population we consume
     1/4 of the world's fossil fuel;
     1/3 of the world paper
     1/5 of the worlds minerals

And America, 5% of the world's population produces 75% of the worlds toxic waste.

So, how many "Americas" can the planet support? 

The United States, at 5% of the world population (about 300 million people) consumes about 25% of the worlds resources.  Let's imagine that another 300 million people develop in the same manner and live a similar lifestyle.  Now we have 10% of the world consuming 50% of the world's resources.  Add another 300 million people and we have 15% of the world consuming 75% of the world's resources.  One more time and we have 20% of humanity using 100% of the worlds resources.

Hmmn.  So 1.2 billion people are living very well.  But the current global population is 6.8 billion.  What happened to the other 5.6 billion people?

Well, they are dead.  We are using up all their resources.

Following our Lead
It is clear that the world cannot even support 4 "Americas."  Turns out that the world is now following in our footsteps.  Most societies have some form of capitalism in place and they are succeeded in creating millions, and millions of new consumers.  People who are now living the same type of lifestyle we do in the US.

Let's add them up:

1. Unites States
2. Europe (that is about 300 million people who live about as well as we do)
3. China (china's economy has been booming for the last 30 years...now have at least 300 million middle class consumers)
4. India (India's economy has been booming for the last decade or so, and have created roughly another "America")
5. Asian Middle Class (Add up the middle class from Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and you get another 300 million consumers)
6. Russia/Central Europe (Add up the growing wealthy elite in these countries and you get another 300 million)
7. China@2030 (At the current rate of growth, China will add another 300 million to their middle class in the next 20 years)
8. India@2030 (At the current rate of growth, India will add another 300 million to their middle class in the next 20 years)

Sooooo, in the next 20 years we are going to have 8 Americas come on line.  There is nothing subtle about this.  No room for negotiation.  There is no technology, or "greater efficiency" or production improvement that can deal with this.  

For the current population to live like Americans, we would need five Earths.  We don't have five earths but we are hurling ahead as if we do.

This last graph says it all.  Somewhere in the 1980's we passed the carrying capacity of the earth.  The longer we stay above that horizontal line the more we are eating away at the earths natural resource capital.

Every day above that line we reduce the earths ability to support life on the planet.  For future generations to survive and flourish, we cannot take resources from the planet faster than the planet can regenerate them.

Our sense of what is a "realistic" lifestyle is simply off the charts.  We need to dramatically change our lives before mother earth does it for us.

1. Buy Less
2. Work Less
3. Drive Less (get rid of one of those cars)
4. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle
5. Buy local (when you must)
6. Live more.  Family.  Friends.  Self

Check out:
Simple Living.net

Why Al Gore Doesn't Matter

From time to time I meet someone who tells me that they don’t believe in climate change. Usually, about 70% of the time, within the next 2 to 3 sentences after making this proclamation, said person will argue that it is all a conspiracy orchestrated by Al Gore. He might add that the issue is just something made up by Al Gore so he and a few scientists can make a lot of money, etc.  Some have heard a rumor that he has this really big house with a huge energy bill so that just proves that he is a hypocrite so global warming must be a lie.

Al Gore?  Who the hell cares what Al Gore has to say?  What do climate scientists say about all this?  Deniers argue that there is no clear scientific consensus on the topic.  They claim that the scientific community is widely split and many doubts remain.  This is beyond ludicrous.  Let me give you a visual representation of how the camps are divided.

 A photo taken at a climate scientists' recent flag football game.  ;-)

Ok, the photo is a joke but the message is accurate -- the vast, vast majority of the science community accepts that climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans.  This is may be shocking to some, especially if you only occasionally follow the issue or catch sound bites from Fox News or if you only catch the headlines from articles and columns from the major newspapers.  Yes, the media has done a terrible job of explaining the story.  And it turns out, not surprisingly, that scientists are poor communicators.  (I will deal with that issue at a later time.)

So, who exactly is saying that climate change is real?  And when did they start saying it?  Is it just a couple of hacks that Al Gore found somewhere?


The Experts
Scientists around the world started to notice the effects of climate change in the 1980s.  In response the United Nations (at the request of the United States and other concerned countries) created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to look into the issue.  The IPCC is made up of the top climate scientists from around the world.  The IPCC does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data.  So what does it do?  Every few years they produce an assessment report based on a review of the latest technical data and peer-reviewed published reports related to climate science.  The purpose of the assessment report is to offer guidance to policy makers (e.g. world leaders and politicians).  Four reports have been produced to date: 1990, 1992, 2001, and 2007.

The IPCC Assessment Report represents THE official view of the scientific community on climate change.  Is this document credible?  Let’s look at the 2007 report.  The document was written after 6 years of work involving 130 countries, 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors.  The validity of each topic section was checked, critiqued, and verified by the leading experts for that field.  The document was reviewed by 2,500 expert reviewers.  I am not sure if you fully appreciate how unbelievably rigorous this review process is. 

A bit of background.  How does science move forward?  Well, normally a scientist does research and then s/he submits the findings to a peer-review journal like the Lancet (health related) or Science, or Nature, etc.  The journal would then search out 1 to 3 experts in that field and ask them to review the study for scientific validity.  If the reviewers feel the methodology and calculations look fine, the study is accepted by the journal for publication.

The IPCC report is reviewed, and re-reviewed by THOUSANDS of the very best scientists of the world.  And the entire submission process is completely transparent – all submissions to the IPCC, all comments, and all responses to comments are available for anyone to review.

Hang on, we are not done yet.  The IPCC then submits the report to the world’s governments to review.  Each country has the right to critique the document and make edits.  The main recommendations and language are NEGOTIATED with the world’s political leaders.  The final document is then submitted to the United Nations where each country has the option to sign on in support of the findings.  If a country does not agree, they simply don’t sign.

The latest report has declared:

1. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
2. Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20^th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

Wow.  For science-speak this is like screaming from the roof-top.  Try getting a scientist to say anything is “unequivocal.”  And as defined in the report, the term “very likely” indicates a >90% probability.  The scientists are saying that they are more than 90% sure global warming is happening and it is caused by humans. 

So who has signed on in support of the IPCC findings?

1. EVERY scientist who participated in producing the document has signed on.  Signature does not mean that a scientist necessarily agrees with every statement in the report but that s/he agrees that the content is fair and credible.
2. EVERY country in the world, including the United States has signed on in support of the document.  Yes, George Bush signed his support for the 2007 report.

Anybody Else?

Has anyone else signed on in support of the findings of the IPCC report?  In the United States the National Academy of Sciences has said:

 “The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue"

Should we listen to the Academy?  It is home to about 2,100 of America’s top scientists with close to 200 of them having won Nobel Prizes for their work. Only the finest scientists our country produces are elected to join this body and membership is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded to a scientist or engineer.  Don't sound like hacks to me.

I got more.

In 2008 the National Academies of 13 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, China, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Japan, India, South Africa, and Mexico). put out this statement:

 “….climate change is happening and that anthropogenic warming is influencing many physical and biological systems.” Among other actions, the declaration urges all nations to “(t)ake appropriate economic and policy measures to accelerate transition to a low carbon society and to encourage and effect changes in individual and national behaviour.”

So, the most prestigious scientific bodies, including most of the top scientific minds on our planet, from some of the most advanced societies in the world support the findings of the IPCC.

Oh, I’m not done. 

These organizations have signed on in support of the IPCC findings:

U.S. Agency for International Development

United States Department of Agriculture

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

National Institute of Standards and Technology

United States Department of Defense

United States Department of Energy

National Institutes of Health

United States Department of State

United States Department of Transportation

U.S. Geological Survey

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

National Center for Atmospheric Research

National Aeronautics & Space Administration

National Science Foundation

Smithsonian Institution

International Arctic Science Committee

Arctic Council

African Academy of Sciences

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias

Cameroon Academy of Sciences

Royal Society of Canada

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Académie des Sciences, France

Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina of Germany

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Accademia nazionale delle scienze of Italy

Indian National Science Academy

Science Council of Japan

Kenya National Academy of Sciences

Madagascar’s National Academy of Arts, Letters and Sciences

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academia Mexicana de Ciencias

Nigerian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society of New Zealand

Polish Academy of Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

l’Académie des Sciences et Techniques du Sénégal

Academy of Science of South Africa

Sudan Academy of Sciences

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Tanzania Academy of Sciences

Turkish Academy of Sciences

Uganda National Academy of Sciences

The Royal Society of the United Kingdom

National Academy of Sciences, United States

Zambia Academy of Sciences

Zimbabwe Academy of Science

American Academy of Pediatrics

American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians

American Astronomical Society

American Chemical Society

American College of Preventive Medicine

American Geophysical Union

American Institute of Physics

American Medical Association

American Meteorological Society

American Physical Society

American Public Health Association

American Quaternary Association

American Institute of Biological Sciences

American Society of Agronomy

American Society for Microbiology

American Society of Plant Biologists

American Statistical Association

Association of Ecosystem Research Centers

Botanical Society of America

Crop Science Society of America

Ecological Society of America

Federation of American Scientists

Geological Society of America

National Association of Geoscience Teachers

Natural Science Collections Alliance

Organization of Biological Field Stations

Society of American Foresters

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Society of Systematic Biologists

Soil Science Society of America

Australian Coral Reef Society

Australian Medical Association

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Engineers Australia

Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies

Geological Society of Australia

British Antarctic Survey

Institute of Biology, UK

Royal Meteorological Society, UK

Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences

Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

European Federation of Geologists

European Geosciences Union

European Physical Society

European Science Foundation

International Association for Great Lakes Research

International Union for Quaternary Research

International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

World Federation of Public Health Associations

World Health Organization

World Meteorological Organization

Damn, that Al Gore guy is goooooood. 

But doesn’t it seem like there are a lot of people saying that climate change is not happening or that the science is far from done.  Yes, it does seem that way.  I will write on this later but for now think of it this way.

Remember when everyone thought smoking was honky dory?  Then a few scientists started producing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer.  The tobacco industry created a research consortium called the U.S. Tobacco Institute and within a few years some scientists and “experts” appeared with studies showing that there was no credible data linking smoking to cancer.  The tobacco industry bought off scientists, hired PR firms to spread disinformation, and lobbied heavily with government officials.  The whole goal of the campaign was to create doubt in the public mind.  We all know how it turned out.  The body of evidence became overwhelming and the tactics and fraud of Big Tobacco were revealed to the public.  We now all accept as common knowledge that smoking can kill you.

That is our reality now.  The illusion of doubt around climate change is simply the output of a well-funded campaign orchestrated by the fossil-fuel industry (because it threatens their profits) and right-wing political parties (because the solutions threaten their world view). 

The evidence however is overwhelming, and climate change can kill you.  We need action now.

Learn more here.

Change your life to reduce emissions that cause climate change.

Demand political action now.  Call your elected official and tell them you want action.

Want to learn more?

Here is great summary of how the IPCC works.

Here is a report that shows how Exxon Mobil has funded over 40 organizations to spread disinformation on climate change.

whew...i am exhausted....gotta write something shorter tomorrow

Houston, We Have A Problem....

Few realize it, but most of us in America are amongst the wealthiest people who have ever inhabited the planet. Yep, even you and me. We live far, far better than the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Emperors of the Roman Empire. We live more comfortably, we are healthier, and we live longer than any King of Kings who came before us. Since the industrial revolution many millions of people have been lifted out of crushing poverty and live reasonably easy lives. Does anyone sense a “but” coming soon?.....

The “but” is that this material wealth has exacted a staggering toll on the environment. The way we raise our food, the technology we use to extract resources, and the processes we use to create products are profoundly destructive. And now, the sheer scale of these processes are overwhelming the planet’s life support systems that keep us, well, alive. We are a victim of our own success.

Let’s look at a few flashing lights to make it more real.

Food Production:

We all need food to survive and we need soil to grow that food.

In 1900 we had 4,000 ton of topsoil/person. In less than 100 years that figure had dropped to about 80 tons of topsoil/person. Each year we are adding about 100 million people to the planet while erosion wipes out about 24 billion tons of topsoil from our farmlands each year.

It takes Nature 100 years to produce 1 inch of topsoil. (An interesting article on this here.)

More people to feed each year, with less topsoil to grow food. Sure, science and technology can help increase productivity, but at some point, basic laws of physics will take over.

Fisheries

Fish and other sea life provide much of the protein for about 1 billion people on the planet. There are 17 major fisheries in the world. We are sucking the life out every one of these fisheries at unsustainable rates. 13 of these fisheries have already either collapsed or are on the brink of collapse. There

are dozens of examples all around the world where fisheries are collapsing. A couple for you:

1. 40,000 fisherman in Newfoundland, Canada have been out of a job for the last 20 years. They over fished the waters off their coast and the Cod population collapsed. Two decades later the population has not recovered.
2. In the Chesapeake Bay the oyster catch has dropped from 6 million bushels/year in the 1960s to less tha n 25,000 bushels now. (In the 1800s this yearly haul was 20 million bushels). So in less than 100 years the oyster population was reduced by 99.6%!
3. Most large predator fish, tuna, marlin, swordfish have been wiped out. Only 10% remain in the oceans now. The tuna population was cut 80% in just the last 15 years.

Water

Five days without fresh water and I am dead. The planet has the same amount of water now that it had a couple of million years ago. It is not making any new water.

In less than 100 years we went from 25,000 cubic meters of water/person to 6,000 cubic meters/person. Why? Well, we have added about 6 billion people to the planet in the last 200 years. And our m odern farming techniques are very water intensive and few people realize that our factories and industries require tremendous amounts of water to make the goods we use every day.

Everything we need to survive comes from the planet. Clean air to breath. Adequate amounts of food and clean water. Protection from toxins and pollution.

In fact there are 8 global major environmental crises brewing around us:

1. Climate Change
2. Deforestation
3. Land Loss
4. Loss of Fresh Water
5. Loss of Marine Fisheries
6. Toxic Pollutants
7. Loss of biodiversity
8. Over fertilization w/nitrogen

I have touched on three of them today and we will visit the others at a later date. The point is, how many of these issues are you aware of? Why don’t we hear more about these issues? These are the issues the media should be discussing. These are the issues our politicians should be working on.

These are the issues our children and grand-children are going to ask us about because these are the megatrends that will have an impact on their lives.

And it is just a hunch, but I think that they are going to be rather difficult and rather angry questions indeed.

How about "ALL MY GOD, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE" - Day?

Here it is only day two on the job and I am already letting someone else pinch hit for me. Below is a posting (from yesterday) from one of my favorite bloggers, Joe Romm who writes Climate Progress, one of the best blogs out there on climate change. I like Joe’s writing style, it is clear and it is in your face. He doesn’t pull any punches. I don’t agree with everything he says but it is always a fun read.

Joe is suggesting that we need to change the name of “Earth Day” (which was Thursday ) because if we don’t deal with climate change, it is the human species that is at risk, not the planet earth. For me, global warming is just a symptom of a much more ominous, much more profound problem. It just turns out that this one symptom is a doozy -- this one side effect of our developmental path could single-handedly knock most of humanity off the map or at least make life very, very unpleasant for a few thousand years.

We are part of the environment. We are not above it. We do not control it (well, not for long). We are not separate from it. What happens to nature, happens to us.

Enjoy Joe’s provocative wit…….

Let’s Rename Earth Day

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

April 21, 2010

In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day seems more relevant than ever because this is the 40th anniversary.

In a 2009 interview last year, our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:

I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.

Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. So if every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don’t think I’m ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn’t drill for oil there. But that’s not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet’s next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.

I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has completely eliminated their feeding habitat — the polar ice, probably by 2020, possibly sooner — polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?

I am a cat lover, but you can’t really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie “Alien”? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.

Apparently there are some plankton that thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don’t see how I’m in a position to march on the nation’s capital to protest their extinction. I won’t eat farm-raised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.

If thousands of inedible species can’t adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like kudzu, cactus, cockroaches, rats, scorpions, the bark beetle, Anopheles mosquitoes and the malaria parasites they harbor. Who are we to pick favorites?

I didn’t hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn’t wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the earth, he wouldn’t have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn’t have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.

All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for — sharp cuts in greenhouse gases — is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren’t so good at articulating that perspective. I’m with them.

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.

So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.

The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.

Two years ago, Science magazine published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of soil aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California. The Hadley Center, the U.K.’s official center for climate change research, found that “areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.” On our current emissions path, most of the South and Southwest ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl.

Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere contains today (see Tundra, Part 1). On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century — so much for being “perma” — and that amplifying carbon-cycle feedback will all but ensure that today’s worst-case scenarios for global warming become the best-case scenarios (see Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return). We must save the tundra. Perhaps it should be small “e” earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.

As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps as much as two inches a year by century’s end (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100” and here). If we warm even 3°C from pre-industrial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 100 feet higher (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”). The first five feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to occur this century on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don’t consider this to be an abstract issue.

Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, they will be gone by century’s end.

So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can’t go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world’s great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word rival, after all, comes from “people who share the same river.” Sure, desalination is possible, but that’s expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we’ll need even more carbon-free power.

Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water — too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do Pro-Life Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.

We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn’t it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens,” at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.

What the day — indeed, the whole year — should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can’t preserve ourselves if we don’t preserve a livable climate, and we can’t preserve a livable climate if we don’t preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

As a penultimate thought, I suspect that many environmentalists and climate science advocates will have their own, private name: “I told you so” Day. Not as a universal as “Triage Day,” I admit, but it has a Cassandra-like catchiness, no?

Finally, perhaps we should call it “science day.” We don’t have a day dedicated to celebrating science, and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?

As always, I’m open to better ideas….